Ah, Wilderness! is an affectionate, humorous portrait of a small-town New England family written by America’s foremost playwright, Eugene O’Neill. Subtitled “A Comedy of Recollection,” Ah, Wilderness! stands alone among O’Neill’s plays as the only comedy he ever wrote.According to O’Neill, the play was “…a sort of wishing out loud…the way I would have liked my boyhood to have been.”Set during a turn-of-the-century 4th of July holiday, the play follows the exploits of 17-year old Richard Miller, a sensitive revolutionary at odds with his parent for reading “dangerous books.” As O’Neill wrote to a friend, “For me it has the sweet charm of a dream of lost youth, a wistfulness of regret, a poignantly melancholy memory of dead things and people-but a smiling memory of those who still live.”

This page is part of an ongoing project to document the history of the theatre productions performed at Wabash College. If you have information not included on this page, please contact the Theater Department or Professor Dwight Watson (watsond@wabash.edu).